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Sunday, October 05, 2014

With our Way of the Wicked campaign finished, we took a couple weeks off and debated what to do next. We often play something a little different in the space between long Adventure Paths to try other things out or get a break from the norm.

We've done short evil adventures, tried out Basic Role Playing, did Star Wars and probably others I can't think of right now. For this break we agreed to play some Numenera. Rognar broke out his GMing short and some of us got together to try it out.

Character creation is pretty simple and quick. Once you get a general idea for your character it comes together pretty quickly.When it comes to role playing games, not all option are created equally and its always tough to guess what sort of character is going to be the most useful. The players discussed what they had in mind for a character. We had one fighter type, one Nano (wizard type), and two Jacks.

I was one of the Jacks. I played Dennis Duvalier, a reformed smooth talking thief. So far at least the game hasn't had much combat so a skilled base character has been very handy. The system itself is quite light. you roll a 20 sided dice and tell the GM what the result was and whether you are trained in the task or not. You can put in effort to make the task easier. The GM thinks about how difficult the task is and lets you know whether you succeeded or not. That's it. No adding different buff modifiers, or adding circumstantial bonuses, or rolling a fistful of dice and then multiplying them on a critical hit.

My initial view of the system is that the PCs were pretty wimpy until we actually fought a battle. I quickly realized that we were not super powerful but most other things are pretty wimpy so in actuality the PCs are pretty tough. With that being said we decided not to pick fights with two very bad-ass looking body guards or an ancient monstrous work. Strong we are, suicidal we are not.

So our Numenera campaign should run until the end of the year. This seems to be quite an epic quest we've found ourselves. The first session was lots of fun and I think everyone is looking forward to what comes next. If I can find the motivation I'll do a write up of the session from my characters point of view.

Looking ahead it appears we're going to be playing Wrath of the Righteous next. After playing evil-doers, we switch over to Big-Damn-Heroes. Everything I've read and my test PCs indicate that the Mythic rules for Pathfinder increase the level of Rocket-tag exponentially